Plextor CD writers

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu May 4 13:49:04 2000

Chuck writes:
> Ok, so a couple of people have pointed out that the Plextor's support 512
> byte sectors. Further the Plextor CD writer also supports 512 byte sectors.
> So my question is can I use it to write a bootable disk image? Has anyone
> tried this? Tim?

You don't need a CD-writer that supports 512-byte sectors in order to write
CDs for VAXen, unless you want to use the same drive on the VAXen for reading
the discs. The discs don't really have a 512-byte format; they always have
the same physical format which is normally presented to the host as 2048-byte
sectors. However, drives that support 512-byte mode will internally split
transfers into 512-byte pieces.

AFAIK, even on a VAX, the available software to *write* CDs uses "normal"
2048-byte transfers.

So I think the answer is that *any* CD-R drive should be able to write a
bootable image.
Received on Thu May 04 2000 - 13:49:04 BST